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196The emotional impact of baseless discrediting of knowledge: An empirical investigation of epistemic injusticeActa Psychologica 244. 2024.According to theoretical work on epistemic injustice, baseless discrediting of the knowledge of people with marginalized social identities is a central driver of prejudice and discrimination. Discrediting of knowledge may sometimes be subtle, but it is pernicious, inducing chronic stress and coping strategies such as emotional avoidance. In this research, we sought to deepen the understanding of epistemic injustice’s impact by examining emotional responses to being discredited and assessing if m…Read more
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159Facial Scars: Do Position and Orientation Matter?Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery 150 (6): 1237-1246. 2022.Background: This study tested the core tenets of how facial scars are perceived by characterizing layperson response to faces with scars. The authors predicted that scars closer to highly viewed structures of the face (i.e., upper lip and lower lid), scars aligned against resting facial tension lines, and scars in the middle of anatomical subunits of the face would be rated less favorably. Methods: Volunteers aged 18 years and older from the United States were recruited through Amazon’s Mechani…Read more
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210Associations of Facial Proportionality, Attractiveness, and Character Traits.Journal of Craniofacial Surgery 33 (5): 1431-1435. 2022.Background: Facial proportionality and symmetry are positively associated with perceived levels of facial attractiveness. Objective: The aims of this study were to confirm and extend the association of proportionality with perceived levels of attractiveness and character traits and determine differences in attractiveness and character ratings between "anomalous" and "typical" faces using a large dataset. Methods: Ratings of 597 unique individuals from the Chicago Face Database were used. A formu…Read more
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192Visual Attention, Bias, and Social Dispositions Toward People with Facial Anomalies: A Prospective Study with Eye-Tracking Technology.Annals of Plastic Surgery 90 (5): 482-486. 2023.Background: Facial attractiveness influences our perceptions of others, with beautiful faces reaping societal rewards and anomalous faces encountering penalties. The purpose of this study was to determine associations of visual attention with bias and social dispositions toward people with facial anomalies. Methods: Sixty subjects completed tests evaluating implicit bias, explicit bias, and social dispositions before viewing publicly available images of preoperative and postoperative patients wi…Read more
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247Cinematic Representations of Facial Anomalies Across Time and CulturesPsyArXiv Preprint 1-32. forthcoming.The “scarred villain” trope, where facial differences like scars signify moral corruption, is ubiquitous in film (e.g., Batman’s The Joker). Strides by advocacy groups to undermine the trope, however, suggest cinematic representations of facial differences could be improving with time. This preregistered study characterized facial differences in film across cultures (US vs. India) and time (US: 1980-2019, India: 2000-2019). Top-grossing films by country and decade were screened for characters wi…Read more
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110Do attitudes about and behaviors towards people who enhance their cognition depend on their looks?PsyArXiv Preprint 1-29. forthcoming.Public attitudes towards cognitive enhancement––e.g., using stimulants like Adderall and Ritalin to improve mental functioning––are mixed. Attitudes vary by context and prompt ethical concerns about fairness, obligation, and authenticity/character. While people may have strong views about the morality of cognitive enhancement, how these views are affected by the physical characteristics of enhancers is unknown. Visible facial anomalies (e.g., scars) bear negatively on perceptions of moral charac…Read more
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167Normalizing Anomalies with Mobile Exposure (NAME): Reducing implicit biases against people with facial anomalies.PsyArXiv Preprint 1-40. forthcoming.This pre-registered study (osf[dot]io/b9g6v) tested the hypothesis that implicit biases towards people with visible facial differences, like scars and palsies, can be reduced through routine exposure to faces bearing such anomalous features. Participants’ implicit biases were measured before and after they completed one of two exposure interventions—to people with facial anomalies, or to people of color (POC). The interventions were delivered remotely using a custom mobile phone application and …Read more
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144First Impressions: Do Faces with Scars and Palsies Influence Warmth, Competence, and Humanization?PsyArXiv Preprint 1-38. forthcoming.A glance is enough for people to assign psychological attributes to another person. Attractiveness is associated with positive attributes contributing to the “beauty-is-good” stereotype. Here, we aimed to study the possibility of a similar but negative bias. Specifically, we asked if people with facial anomalies are associated with negative characteristics, and if so, what accounts for this association. We tested the hypothesis that biases against faces with scars and palsies arise because of ne…Read more
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101CRediT where Credit is Due: A Comment on Leising et al. (2022).Personality Science 3 (e1234): 32-37. 2022.Leising and colleagues propose a 10-step checklist that they argue will facilitate “a better personality science.” Although we agree with many of the proposed steps, whether the checklist separates “good research” from bad is an empirical matter. A critical component of Leising and colleagues’ steps toward improving scientific standards in personality center around consensus building. There are several critical ways in which the methods for building consensus in psychology could have unintended …Read more
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179Subgenual activation and the finger of blame: individual differences and depression vulnerability.Psychological Medicine 52 (8): 1560-1568. 2022.Background: Subgenual cingulate cortex (SCC) responses to self-blaming emotion-evoking stimuli were previously found in individuals prone to self-blame with and without a history of major depressive disorder (MDD). This suggested SCC activation reflects self-blaming emotions such as guilt, which are central to models of MDD vulnerability. Method: Here, we re-examined these hypotheses in an independent larger sample. A total of 109 medication-free participants (70 with remitted MDD and 39 healthy…Read more
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570What is Good is Beautiful (and What isn’t, isn’t): How Moral Character Affects Perceived Facial Attractiveness.Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 1-9. 2022.A well-documented “beauty is good” stereotype is expressed in the expectation that physically attractive people have more positive characteristics. Recent evidence has also found that unattractive faces are associated with negative character inferences. Is what is good (bad) also beautiful (ugly)? Whether this conflation of aesthetic and moral values is bidirectional is not known. This study tested the hypothesis that complementary “good is beautiful” and “bad is ugly” stereotypes bias aesthetic…Read more
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98Evidence against the “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype in Hadza hunter gatherers.Scientific Reports 12 (8693): 1-10. 2022.People have an “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype whereby they make negative inferences about the moral character of people with craniofacial anomalies like scars. This stereotype is hypothesized to be a byproduct of adaptations for avoiding pathogens. However, evidence for the anomalous-is-bad stereotype comes from studies of European and North American populations; the byproduct hypothesis would predict universality of the stereotype. We presented 123 Hadza across ten camps pairs of morphed Hadza f…Read more
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153The effect of aging on facial attractiveness: An empirical and computational investigation.Acta Psychologica 219 (103385): 1-11. 2021.How does aging affect facial attractiveness? We tested the hypothesis that people find older faces less attractive than younger faces, and furthermore, that these aging effects are modulated by the age and sex of the perceiver and by the specific kind of attractiveness judgment being made. Using empirical and computational network science methods, we confirmed that with increasing age, faces are perceived as less attractive. This effect was less pronounced in judgments made by older than younger…Read more
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110The Face Image Meta-Database (fIMDb) & ChatLab Facial Anomaly Database (CFAD): Tools for research on face perception and social stigma.Methods in Psychology 5 (100063): 1-9. 2021.Investigators increasingly need high quality face photographs that they can use in service of their scholarly pursuits—whether serving as experimental stimuli or to benchmark face recognition algorithms. Up to now, an index of known face databases, their features, and how to access them has not been available. This absence has had at least two negative repercussions: First, without alternatives, some researchers may have used face databases that are widely known but not optimal for their researc…Read more
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191Self-blame-Selective Hyperconnectivity Between Anterior Temporal and Subgenual Cortices and Prediction of Recurrent Depressive EpisodesJAMA Psychiatry 72 (11): 1119-1126. 2015.Importance: Patients with remitted major depressive disorder (MDD) were previously found to display abnormal functional magnetic resonance imaging connectivity (fMRI) between the right superior anterior temporal lobe (RSATL) and the subgenual cingulate cortex and adjacent septal region (SCSR) when experiencing self-blaming emotions relative to emotions related to blaming others (eg, "indignation or anger toward others"). This finding provided the first neural signature of biases toward overgener…Read more
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154Negative emotions towards others are diminished in remitted major depressionEuropean Psychiatry 30 (4): 448-453. 2015.Background: One influential view is that vulnerability to major depressive disorder (MDD) is associated with a proneness to experience negative emotions in general. In contrast, blame attribution theories emphasise the importance of blaming oneself rather than others for negative events. Our previous exploratory study provided support for the attributional hypothesis that patients with remitted MDD show no overall bias towards negative emotions, but a selective bias towards emotions entailing se…Read more
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271A multilevel social neuroscience perspective on radicalization and terrorism.Social Neuroscience 13 (5). 2018.Why are some people capable of sympathizing with and/or committing acts of political violence, such as attacks aimed at innocent targets? Attempts to construct terrorist profiles based on individual and situational factors, such as clinical, psychological, ethnic, and socio-demographic variables, have largely failed. Although individual and situational factors must be at work, it is clear that they alone cannot explain how certain individuals are radicalized. In this paper, we propose that a com…Read more
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578Which moral exemplars inspire prosociality?Philosophical Psychology 35 (7): 943-970. 2022.Some stories of moral exemplars motivate us to emulate their admirable attitudes and behaviors, but why do some exemplars motivate us more than others? We systematically studied how motivation to emulate is influenced by the similarity between a reader and an exemplar in social or cultural background (Relatability) and how personally costly or demanding the exemplar’s actions are (Attainability). Study 1 found that university students reported more inspiration and related feelings after reading …Read more
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2526The Neuroscience of Moral Judgment: Empirical and Philosophical DevelopmentsIn Felipe De Brigard & Walter Sinnott-Armstrong (eds.), Neuroscience and philosophy, The Mit Press. pp. 17-47. 2022.We chart how neuroscience and philosophy have together advanced our understanding of moral judgment with implications for when it goes well or poorly. The field initially focused on brain areas associated with reason versus emotion in the moral evaluations of sacrificial dilemmas. But new threads of research have studied a wider range of moral evaluations and how they relate to models of brain development and learning. By weaving these threads together, we are developing a better understanding o…Read more
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332Morality is in the eye of the beholder: the neurocognitive basis of the “anomalous-is-bad” stereotypeAnnals of the New York Academy of Sciences 999 (999): 1-15. 2021.Are people with flawed faces regarded as having flawed moral characters? An “anomalous-is-bad” stereotype is hypothesized to facilitate negative biases against people with facial anomalies (e.g., scars), but whether and how these biases affect behavior and brain functioning remain open questions. We examined responses to anomalous faces in the brain (using a visual oddball paradigm), behavior (in economic games), and attitudes. At the level of the brain, the amygdala demonstrated a specific neur…Read more
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2467The Dark Side of Morality – Neural Mechanisms Underpinning Moral Convictions and Support for ViolenceAmerican Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 11 (4): 269-284. 2020.People are motivated by shared social values that, when held with moral conviction, can serve as compelling mandates capable of facilitating support for ideological violence. The current study examined this dark side of morality by identifying specific cognitive and neural mechanisms associated with beliefs about the appropriateness of sociopolitical violence, and determining the extent to which the engagement of these mechanisms was predicted by moral convictions. Participants reported their mo…Read more
Philadelphia, PA, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Moral Psychology |
Areas of Interest
Moral Psychology |